My little brother and I say few words to each other as we get in the car and pull out of the garage. It’s 7:00 in the morning, and neither of us are early risers. It’s also our Winter Break—I am taking a break from being a college student and he is taking a break from being Louisiana’s reigning Science Olympiad Middle School Champion. His shirt is on backwards, but I say nothing about it because I know he likes to wear it like that. I look down at my own outfit and realize that my loafers are probably not the best shoe for the day’s excursion, but I keep them on because we are already running late. I play something that I think is an acceptable middle ground for our music tastes: bossa nova, the natural intersection between R&B and Roblox meme songs.
We are up this early because it’s almost Christmas, and our mother has signed us up to volunteer at our local food bank. Holiday service is not a tradition in my family: we are neither religious nor community people, and we’ve only just moved to this area. But my mother has recently been on a home education kick, which includes building strong civic values in the budding mind of my little brother. So here we are, on the I–10, listening to João Gilberto in silence.
The first time I volunteered at a food bank was in elementary school, where I had to fulfill mandatory service hours to pass the third grade. Although my mother could not afford to take six hours off of work to accompany me, we nonetheless stood there for six hours next to another mother and daughter, portioning out grains and powdered nutrients into bags, which were then weighed and sealed to be delivered—to a country, somewhere, that we will probably never visit. I made it my mission to apportion the food perfectly with the little measuring cup I was given, and took joy in the fact that, due to my attention to detail, my bags weighed exactly ten pounds on the first try. There was not much talking, but four hours went by quickly, and soon, I found myself in line to receive the service hour stamp of approval. Before we left, a blonde pony-tailed girl with a blue Christian sleepaway camp T-shirt and maybe ten beaded friendship bracelets per arm called out to our group and asked us all to join together for prayer. So my mother and I, having never once opened a Bible, bowed our heads and closed our eyes and said Amen, only looking up to check if we were doing the same thing as everyone else.
When my brother and I arrive at this food bank, I quickly learn that my previous mastery of the measuring cup will not help me here. We will be sorting community donations—Kraft Mac & Cheese and Campbell Soup—into large cardboard boxes, which will be given to families in the local community. Instead of a peppy teenage girl, the organizers of this food bank are all retired veterans, who run this operation as volunteers. At our orientation, I notice the groups of people in our morning cohort: tweens here because of church group, their chaperones, and a couple of middle-aged women who are coworkers at LSU. My brother and I, with his backwards shirt and my non-ergonomic loafers, stick out like sore thumbs. No one talks to us.
This changes when we are brought to the warehouse, a large echoey space where cardboard boxes are already piled high and packages of food are pre-sorted into large cages. A large man in a veteran cap and a red shirt that has the name of the food bank printed on it seems to be in charge. When he sees my brother and I amongst the group, he puts his hands on his hips and leans forward and stares at us for a moment. Then he shouts, “O-hi-o!” I’m confused, so I just chuckle a little. He shouts again, “O-hi-o!”
I correct him, “We’re from Louisiana.”
This is not the answer he’s looking for. He says, “Japanese? O-hi-o. It’s Japanese, you don’t know it?” I start to feel my face burn. Everyone else is watching, silently.
I say, “No. But we can speak English.”
“What are you two? Korean? Japanese? Chinese?”
“Chinese.” I say. I am grinding my teeth a little.
“I could tell,” he says, proudly. Clearly not, I think.
Then he says, “Ming bai ma?” I do not understand what he is saying through his American accent, so I just sort of stand there and look at him.
He says louder, “Ming bai ma!”
At this point, I realize that this interaction has gone on for too long and I feel the need to say something, so I just repeat again, “We can speak English. We’re from America.”
“It means ‘do you understand’,” he says, matter-of-factly. My back is sweaty and I stay silent.
Having finally realized that I am not in the mood to joke around, he then turns to the group and splits us up by station. My brother and I are assigned to the box-making group, where we fold and tape cardboard into rectangular boxes, stacking them at the end of the line. I look over at my brother for any signs of humiliation or tears or anger. There are none. He is a stoic box-stacker in the chaos of the warehouse.
Suddenly, I hear, “So, Chinese? Korean? Where are you two from?” A new man, in the same red t-shirt, looks at me expectingly. You’re joking. I evaluate my options before I answer. I could cause a ruckus by yelling at him and impart some of the embarrassment I have already received from his colleague. But I figure that this wouldn’t be the best show to put on in front of my brother, who is sensitive about abrasive social interactions and would likely never want to be seen in public with me again. So I choose to accept my defeat and answer the question:
“We’re from New Orleans. We’re Chinese.”
In the next ten minutes, I learn that this man served in Korea and is married to a Chinese wife whom he met while stationed abroad. He has what he calls a “Chinese daughter,” but she is “not his,” whatever that means. His wife does not speak English, and he does not speak Chinese, so they “mix.” They have gotten by, mixing like this, for over twenty years. He says that his own granddaughter, not the one from the Chinese side, is off to college at UT Austin. I say, “Oh, my parents went there for graduate school.”
This surprises him. “Wow, did they really?”
I feel a strange urge to one-up him, even though I know I shouldn’t. “My dad’s a biomedical engineering professor at Tulane, and my mom’s an actuary.”
After a few more minutes of silent box-making, he starts again. “So, they can speak English?”
“Well, it would’ve been hard for them to graduate from UT Austin if they didn’t speak English,” I shoot back. Now he is the one who does not say anything—my logic is impenetrable.
Then he asks, “Are you in school? LSU or LaTech?”
Like every Yale student, I answer sheepishly, “No, I go out-of-state.”
“Where?” Damn it.
“Yale.”
“Wow,” he pauses, “You?” He says this like he cannot believe that I, a child of doctoral degree-holding parents who paradoxically can’t speak English, has somehow found my way into the Ivy League.
“Yes, me.” I find myself, sickeningly, enjoying his curiosity. Side by side, in the rhythm of the box-making line, I am sharing stories about my life and family and background with someone who cannot see me as anything but a foreigner, picked from a foreign land that surely must resemble the one his wife came from. Despite all this, I am curious too, about his time in the military, why he chose to work for the food bank after retiring, if he ever thinks of visiting China. I already know some of the answers to these questions: No, he does not think about visiting China. But other answers surprise me. After a career in combat, he told me that he had felt idle in retirement. The food bank was a way for him to feel like he was serving some purpose to the community. And he was honest: he hadn’t exactly figured out what that purpose was or what it meant to him, but at nearly eighty years old, he was content to keep finding out.
Break time is called, and I look to my brother to see if he wants anything. He wants the bathroom, so we begin heading out. As we walk towards the orientation room, I hear behind me:
“Ming bai ma!” It’s the guy from earlier.
This time, having had the benefit of this interaction ruminate in my mind for the past hour and devising things to say in response, I turn around and shout firmly so he can ming bai, “We can speak English just fine. We’re just here to volunteer, okay? You don’t have to do all that.” I turn back and start walking again.
“Hey!” He’s angry now. I expect my brother to scurry away but he stays by me, for which I am grateful. “My wife is half Japanese,” the man says.
“Good for you,” I say, playing it off with a little more enthusiasm since I don’t know how this is going to go. I notice that my heart is racing and I tell it to stop.
“I have Japanese, Chinese, Korean family, you name it.” My brother and I are totally cornered now, alone with the man.
I am nervous because he looks mad but also like he is trying to explain himself. I steel myself and ask, “How did you meet?”
“Military base in Tokyo.” Right. He proceeds to ramble a bit about how he knows many Japanese people and has lived in Japan and knows the culture. I feel the urge to tell him that we are not Japanese and do not know anything about the culture and my brother really needs to use the bathroom. But I don’t. Finally, he lets us go. I take my brother to the bathroom and as I wait for him I start crying. I cry very hard and it doesn’t stop. I take the sleeve of my shirt and rub my eyes against it. When my brother comes out, he sees my face and I just mumble something about a thing in my eye.
After what feels like years, we finally finish the last leg of our volunteer shift. Mr. My-Wife-Is-Japanese gathers the group together and applauds everyone for the job they did today. He says that we have packaged boxes for two hundred families in the community, and they won’t be going hungry this Christmas. Then he begins tearing up. His voice cracks as he tells us that his goal was to hit two thousand volunteer hours by the end of this year, but as this is the last session of service the food bank will be holding, he is still about sixty-three hours short. “Maybe next year,” he consoles himself in front of us. Then, he asks us to join him in prayer, and we give thanks to the Lord and His kindness. My brother and I bow our heads and close our eyes. My eyes stay closed, but I can feel my brother looking up to check if he is doing the same as everyone else.
The drive back is as quiet as the drive over. Bossa nova is playing. I blink away tears as my brother looks out the car window, pretending not to see me to give me the dignity of crying alone.